Published

links for 12 May 2006

Ah I *want* to love digital ‘art’ but mostly I think it’s terrible. This one is great. It’s a database of several million human feelings that uses a series of playful interfaces that allow you to search and sort across demographic slices. Via Andy Polaine

Published

On a slightly related note, you should check out this paper from MIT Medialab student Hugo Liu, which deals with extracting mood from blogs – not a million miles away from the “We feel fine” except it’s not as much fun. Very, very interesting, though, as is most of Hugo’s work –

But on to digital Art. Most of the stuff I like has come from Japan. That’s probably partly because I love Japan, but I think it’s also that there’s a good deal more experimentation happening there, and it’s well supported.

Other things you may like: The great Toshio Iwai, with his “Well of Lights”, and the ever-popular “Music Insects”, which must be my favourite installation ever –

A few years back at the Experimenta “House of Tomorrow” exhibition in Melbourne I saw Takahisa Suzuki’s Info.Table, which I loved. It was a book, which appeared to be blank until you put your hands near it, whereupon patterns would appear on the pages and react to your movement (I’m over-simplifying – you have to see it to get it).

A lot of Japanese interactive art seems to blur the line between game and art. In my experience a lot of Japan seems to blur the lines between life, game and art, too. Anyway, there have been some astonishingly good interactive artworks out of Japan over the years, and some of the best work by artists from other countries has been done while in Japan (Bill Seaman, Peter Callas, various others).

I’m quite partial to this piece of bizarreness, in which you capture goblins with a vacuum cleaner. Part game, part “Ghostbusters”, it’s more than a little strange –